Mushroom Memoir

I joined the Brownie Troop at Oakview Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1965. The troop was full, but the Girl Scout Troop needed leaders, and they told my mom that they would let me join if she volunteered. I don’t remember much about the Brownie activities. I do recall the day an older kid leaving detention, for an infraction unknown to me, set the couch in the teacher’s lounge on fire during our Brownie meeting, and I do remember being one of only two girls who were crying about it. Half the school burned down from that little lit cigarette butt. I also remember wearing the Brownie uniform, and I kept the little gold Brownie pin for many years.

In fact, the little gold pin (not real gold!) was only recently stolen, when someone broke into my house, left my old laptop and took the jewelry box. I live, and have lived, in a rural area for 34 years now. They didn’t have to break the wood frame of the door, but they did. The basement door is left unlocked. But that would have been too easy. Of course, the cops didn’t care, even though it was one of a series of recent B&E’s.

Of course, the size lumber that was used to build the house in the 1840’s no longer exists. My neighbor Wayne had the brilliant idea of flipping the board around its vertical axis, so the damaged portion would be hidden in the wall. That facilitated and sped up the repair.

Anyway, back to the Girl Scouts. My mother kept on being a troop Leader when I graduated to the Junior Girl Scouts in 4^th Grade. Pretty much everyone disliked her. She had a short fuse. Perhaps due to lead poisoning. She grew up in Fairmont, West Virginia. After the Flint (Michigan) Water Crisis (due to lead contamination), a large group of scholars got together for a research project, and they showed that local murder rates in the early part of the 20^th Century were very closely correlated with the distance of the town from a lead smelter. Lead, at that time, was the material of choice for all the snazzy new municipal water system pipes. It didn’t rust like steel. Richer municipalities, along with those closer to the lead smelters, used lead pipes. Flint was wealthy at the time. A center of manufacturing.

Back to my mom. Perhaps adding to her lack of patience were her bad teeth. She had a lot of mercury based amalgam fillings. My sister didn’t want to hear my theory of our mother’s temper’s relationship to her fillings, but I think the fillings and the lead pipes in Fairmont probably had a significant effect. I didn’t know her father, who died before I was born, but nobody else in the family ever seemed to have such a temper. Anyway, she was a tough woman, but the Girl Scout Troop did a lot of exciting outdoor activities when she was the leader. We did many overnight camping trips. Way more than most troops. People are always complicated.

Adding to my early exposure to nature, at some time even before joining the Girl Scouts, my parents had decided that we should do family camping. No trailer for them. After the first trial with rented equipment, we had a giant canvas tent that would sleep 8, for the four of us and the miniature poodle. We visited the Shenandoah National Forest on our early trips, and my parents kept the top of the Styrofoam “ice-chest” with the bear fang punctures for many years, as a souvenir of one of the most exciting nights of our lives. The dog was terrified. It made a good story. See, I am still telling it 60 years later!

All that goes to say that, at an early age, I was, despite growing up in suburbia, introduced to nature. My first gardening adventure was growing radishes at age 4. They turned out very spicy. My mother served them as the “bitter herb” for the Passover Seder. The years that I have not had a garden are very few. A couple of summers when I was in college. A couple of years when I lived overseas.

When I had a chance, I moved to a rural area. I live on a forty acre plot, with a hundred by hundred foot fenced area for a garden and small orchard. For the last 5 years or so, I have been growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley, radishes, garlic, nasturtiums, and various other things, to make “veggie juice smoothie packs.” I try to have a home grown juice smoothie every morning for breakfast. My goal is 225 juice packs in the freezer for the winter and spring.

The garden is a big part of why it’s painful for me to contemplate moving away. Losing the chance to see a dark night sky is another big reason. Looking up and the stars, and thinking about how people have been looking at some of the same groups of stars that we call constellations for as long as 30,000 years is just amazing to me. Way back then, Deneb, the swan goddess’s tail, was the pole star. Myths and archeological finds (Gobeckli Tepe) from the ancient near east and Europe hint at the religious traditions of that time. Before I moved out to the country, I knew the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia (the giant double-u). I don’t really remember even understanding the mythological significance of Orion, and his dog, Sirius. The whole calendar of the ancient Egyptians was based on the appearance of Sirius after it had spent time below the horizon. During the Geminid meteor showers last week, it was very clear and the date was close to the new moon, so very dark. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, was sparkling white, green and red. I feel sorry for city dwellers.

But, as much as I love working in the garden, being in the garden, eating my own produce, ugly heirloom tomatoes and all, and taking a few minutes on clear nights to ponder the stars, there’s something even more special about hunting for wild mushrooms in the woods at the back of the property. On occasion, on my way to the back of the property, I have found Dryad’s Saddles, edible if young enough, in the grass, or sprouting from a tree, or giant puffballs along the south-eastern edge of the property. Neither are very tasty, but they are edible and so a decent consolation prize. But the tastiest prizes are in the back, with the big oaks and maples and other, mostly deciduous, trees.

Learning to recognize and get brave enough to eat chicken-of-the-woods, hens-of-the-woods, shrimp-of-the-woods, green quilted Russulas, black trumpets, white and yellow oysters, red chanterelles, entolomas, and a VERY few morels, while avoiding eating Jack-O-Lanterns, red Russulas, Destroying Angels, “Little Brown Mushrooms,” and Angels Wings…. Now that’s a skill. Because I have taught myself, and have never yet gotten sick. As “they” say, “There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters!”

Most of the people in my neighborhood learned to find morels when they were kids. Nobody where I grew up hunted mushrooms. Or at least I do not recall, even among the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts in my social circles, anyone who hunted and ate wild mushrooms. And even my current neighbors are surprised to discover that when I say I hunt mushrooms, I do not mean “only morels.”

It has definitely been challenging to learn to understand the jargon of mycology. One of my early finds was a whole clump of giant white, funnel-shaped mushrooms at the edge of a water-logged area near the tree that I was convinced for years was an elm, but I now think is a beech. I looked through all my books and could not find anything remotely resembling these beautiful, snow-white, 8 – 10 inch high, 5- 6 inch diameter fungi. Any one would have made a meal! Some months later, I finally “grokked” that the cap shape descriptions in the books were not random. “Oh it might be flat, it might be convex.” No. The point was that they always go through a sequence, usually from convex, to flat, to concave. So the reason that those shrooms looked the way they did was because they were at the end of the cycle of maturity of the “fruiting body,” and the caps had turned inside out. Usually, the pictured examples of mushrooms in guide books are sooner after they pop up.

The aspiring shroom hunter needs to learn all the vocabulary associated with the way the gills, or other “fertile” surface is connected, or not, to the stem; the vocabulary to describe the shape of the stems; and the vocabulary used to describe the habits of the particular species, such as “gregarious,” or “solitary,” or “clustered.” The aspiring mycologist needs to know the difference between gilled shrooms, and shrooms with pores. For the pored shrooms, are they boletes, or are they polypores? Numerous older books say no polypores (which include Dryad’s Saddles, Chickens, and Hens) are poisonous, but newer books don’t want to be that BOLD!!!! Too many people have taken up this hobby. The experts want people to be sure that they have identified the exact species before cooking and consuming it.

Way too many people, IMO, are willing to eat a shroom that someone in a Reddit forum or some software says is ok. This is insane. Ok, there are a FEW mushrooms that are recognizable, just by looking at the cap shape and coloration. But the software apps that act like they can identify a mushroom from the view of the cap are completely ridiculous. Ok, for pure curiosity, fine. But not to eat. Period. Stay cowardly.

A lot of my finds go in the compost, mostly unidentified. For the first time, I found what I was pretty sure were blewits this fall, but after checking in all of my books and a few reliable on-line sites, I wasn’t sure if a) they were blewits or b) blewits are always safe to eat. I was excited when I identified “Woman on a Motorcycle.” I didn’t eat it, but I was highly confident that I knew what it was.

Maybe it would be ok to die of mushroom poisoning, since that supposedly was how the Buddha finally entered Nirvana. But, the symptoms of organ failure that the Amanitas and other really deadly shrooms cause are not reportedly fun to live through. One of my engineer colleagues told me about mistaking Jack-O-Lanterns for chanterelles. He does not care to repeat the experience. My plan is to continue to be a cowardly mushroom hunter.

As I age, and my joints creak, and I don’t move so fast, and I still have to work for a living, I wonder if it even makes sense for me to keep living out in the country, where it’s so hard to find people to help with the garden and mowing the lawn, etc. But then I realize that if I move to the city or the suburbs, I will sit on my rear end even more of the time, instead of getting out in the fresh air and growing and hunting my own produce, and admiring the same stars that all the famous and forgotten people since antiquity, and even before antiquity, have viewed.

Joyous Just Passed Solstice, Merry Christmas if you celebrate, and happy New Year. I’m not terribly optimistic that 2024 will be an improvement over 2023. The world seems to be falling apart. But some people manage to find joy anyway.